Survival is discovering you are out of stamps. Living is going to buy more and forgetting what else it is you need. Mayo Smith should have written it down. Mayo Smith should have written it all down. The great wheel … Continue reading Mayo Smith is aware of the years

You could not say Kevin Kiermaier’s eyes looked like the remembered Blue of your older sister’s nail polish remover,  Towed from shelves, dutifully regretted, litigated — the fumes Of which smelled of camphor and surgery and sent a cancer Galloping … Continue reading Kevin Kiermaier’s Eyes Are a Certain Blue

The front leg bends back like a bough Before it snaps in a boy’s hands. The cleats stomp shallow hollows into the clay As the belt buckle rolls toward sundown. The elbow strokes the ribs, the bottom arm locks tetanus … Continue reading Ichiro’s Swing

Looking back, When you bounded into Sutter’s arms It seems too obvious an ascension Of a man who brushed his burst fingers against the endurable Only when he was ashamed. In the beery afterglow, Your words as simple as you longed to be, Your words, like your swing — that motel Gideon’s Bible of a swing — Lunging, halting, Then hoping. You can do this, we know, this hitting, catching, running. But it’s the after — the plenteous and undetailed after, The quiet after — To which you’ll always belong. *** You marooned your truck on a roadside tree stump … Continue reading For Darrell Porter

He pitched as though he were throwing fallen apples at a knothole. Then again, he threw fallen apples at a knothole As though he were throwing fallen apples at a knothole. For there is no mystery in the literal, no … Continue reading Rube Waddell Is Dying

In the upper reaches of a multipurpose stadium, Thunder has been set on fire. In these distant perches, This tent revival of hawks, Cheap of the dollar, rich of the possible, We are ransacking the hopes We hide beneath our … Continue reading Upon Viewing a Watermarked Photo of the 1972 World Series

I’m telling you, Simmons, those days! Your tresses plunged like the Bellwether stocks of the times. Like the necklines of those Who tottered for your notice. We shan’t survive these times, said wartime leaders! We shan’t survive Ted Simmons And … Continue reading Several exclamations regarding Ted Simmons

Let us throw up at a ballgame, you and me. Collars high, gents! Wangs paraded, cavaliers! Our testicles are covered by moss and lichen. This is because they are boulders. So let us throw up at a ballgame, you and … Continue reading Let us throw up at a ballgame

Baseball, while lonesome, is nothing like life. Otherwise no one would play. It doesn’t diminish you, rend you in quite the same way. But it can diminish you. It teaches you things about baseball, Not about our vain grasps at … Continue reading Upon giving my son his first glove

1. In love poems we talk about eye color. Your eyes are the color of the virginity that Brooke Shields just lost And the luxury Oldsmobile she’ll give birth to nine months hence. In benedictions we ask the firmament for … Continue reading To a photograph of Dave Parker